Hacking
Master Bypass Console The Master Bypass Console is an item required to hack objects. It can be found in two guaranteed locations and nowhere else: the Radio Tower and the room on the stairs that lead down to the Facility. This means that there are no more and no less than two Master Bypass Consoles in a single game. The Master Bypass Console is only capable of hacking items that are locked by keycard readers. This includes Secured Crates and keycard doors. Hackable items are also shown by a rotating black circle around the keycard reader which is visible through walls, allowing the player to locate hackable items easily. Hacking When you begin a hack, a mid-sized window will appear with many boxes and numbers. The boxes with a white border contain numbers 0 through 9 and are able to be changed by clicking on them. Left clicks increase the value by 1 and right clicks decrease the value by 1. Each box is considered an input, and these inputs affect the values of the right-most boxes. The ultimate goal of a hack is to get the right-most values equal to the boxes that are connected with red lines. Once the values are equal, the lines will turn green, completing the hack. Currently, the effect of changing each value is randomized for each hack (as well as the solution), meaning there is no single method for guaranteed success. The recommended steps to follow, though, are: # Take turns incrementing each box to figure out what effect each box has on the right-most values (whether or not the right-most values increase or decrease and if it's by a large or small amount) # Now set each value to 0 # Use educated guesses to get the right-most values close to what they need to be based on what you found in the first step # Once you are close, take turns changing each value up or down by 1 or 2 to see if you can reach the solution # If you are stuck on step 4, returning to step 1 or 3 could prove useful Alternatively, you can either click the boxes randomly or attempting every single solution starting at 0,0,0,0,0 (or however many inputs there are) and going upwards, though both of those methods are extremely slow and may only work for lower difficulty hacks. For a more in-depth guide to hacking, check the Advanced Hacking Guide page. Solution Formulas Hacks have predetermined 'solution formulas' that are unknown to the player. For example, a Difficulty 1 hack tends to have two different input boxes, which we will call A and B, and a single Output value. The formula for this output is A + B, which is unknown to the player. However, it can still be easily discovered through experimentation. Difficulty 4 hacks, on the other hand, can get much more complex. They tend to have 5 separate inputs with 2 different outputs. A randomized formula could be: Output 1 = (F - (((B + (D - E)) - C) * 1)) Output 2 = (((((((C - (((((F - E) - 5) - 1) + 9)^2))^2) * D) * 6)^2) * 7) - B) The solution for this would be: C = 8, B = 5, E = 9, D = 5, F = 8 As you would think, such formulas would be near impossible to discover through experimenting with inputs. Therefore, the only way reasonable way to solve higher difficulty hacks would be to either make educated guesses (via the above steps) or to guess randomly, both with varying success rates. Keycard Doors These doors are rather obvious and you most likely already have seen them around the map. Keycard doors are most notably located on the shipwreck (for the armory and Engine room) and in the facility (for the room that disables the facility traps). For each keycard door, if you did not have a Master Bypass Console, a keycard of varying level would be required to open the door. The difficulty of the hack corresponds to the minimum level of the keycard that would open the door. For example, the engine room door requires a level 1 keycard to open, meaning the hack for it will be of difficulty 1, and the Facility door requires a level 3 keycard to open, meaning the hack for it will be of difficulty 3. Side note: You must click on the door itself to initiate the hack, not the keycard reader. Secured Crates Secured Crates are crates normally found within or around the Facility. As discussed above, these crates are locked and require either the Master Bypass Console or a keycard to open. Each crate has a different security level ranging from 1 to 4. Security levels indicate both the minimum keycard required to open the crate and the difficulty of hacking it. Higher security level also crates have a cleaner look and provide better loot. This ranges from security level 1 crates spawning things like flashlights to security level 4 crates spawning things like flamethrowers and grenade launchers. Side note: Lower security level crates often display what item they contain on the back. Higher security level crates normally have this as 'classified.'